The Fantastic in English Devotional Literature

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will challenge us to take a less impoverished view of devotional poetry, eschewing texts and themes we find familiar or trite, but rather looking for what is weird, uncomfortable, and wonderful in Christian texts. We will find talking trees, shape-shifting, and levitation in our texts, as well as mind-bending plots and doctrines, which shake the soul of the devotee awake, not put it to sleep. We will survey the strange and unusual in English devotional literature from its very beginning with the Christian missions to England in the sixth and seventh centuries, all the way to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in the later twentieth. As we move through centuries of devotional poetry, we will consider questions like these: what is strange to us in these texts? What might their original authors have found strange? How does this strangeness increase devotion? How does it change, challenge, or strengthen belief? Texts in Old English and all but the clearest in Middle English will be provided in translation. After the “Reformation” unit, there will be both Catholic and Protestant texts represented in the syllabus. Our timeline, however, will place some emphasis on the “Catholic Literary Revival” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as this movement was itself viewed in its time as quite strange and sometimes unchristian (or at least scandalous) by the Protestant majority in England. Our class sessions will revolve around lectures and seminar-style discussions, except on Fridays, which are reserved solely for discussions and student presentations on the readings.